What Image Format do I need and how do I implement it?

I am creating a turn based strategy game and want to represent resources will little pictures of what those resources are. There could be dozens of these little pictures on the screen at any given time.

What image file format do I use?

Also, how do I go about spawning these images into the world? I have to create a material with the image as the texture?

Then apply the material to a mesh or use it with a decal?

Well, you could use any image format for your image sources, it will be converted to proper format upon importing and will be cooked to target platform format, just make sure UE supports this format for import.

Regarding spawning it inside the world, it depends on your goals, you want it to be projected onto terrain or something like its plane mesh, for example?

I didn’t work with decals but i believe it can’t accept ray traces and thus i can’t see any way to interact with decals as is.

I believe it should be some actor with collision shape and decal component, as i said earlier, i didn’t work with decals so i’m not sure if decal component will work in this case.

Thanks. I don’t need to interact with the pictures, just display them.

I think decals just act as a projector which displays the material onto a mesh. I just have to somehow line up the decal with perhaps a little floating instanced(hopefully) static mesh so that the decal is projected on to it and not the terrain behind it.

Do you know if any specific image type would be better or worse for both quality and/or performance if I used it as the base prior to importing? Like maybe a Bitmap would be top quality, but overkill on performance?

I used PNG format and it imported as a texture just fine. Made a material and set it to Decal and have it displaying on a static mesh. Pretty easy.

The only hard part was putting my non-existent art skills to work to get the base images sized properly… :stuck_out_tongue: